I too have the same experience with mp3.com. When they started, it was wonderful, no limits on your mp3s and no ads. Now it is pathetic, and virtually useless for the artist to get their stuff out there. You can only have three cuts, there are ads, and a person can't even listen to a single mp3 without providing their email address; no doubt to be spammed.

We want very much to offer streaming, or at least downloaded music, for artists here on electro-music.com. The details of how to do this needto be worked out. I love the original mp3.com concept: a free site for musicians, no censorship, no limits. I can understand how this is not practical unless funded by some deep pockets. There are certainly unavoidable costs for disk space and network bandwidth. With what seemed like tens of thousands of artiists, one can deduce what happend to mp3 and others that tried this.

One other problem is that cheap web hosting companies almost always prohibit streaming.

I'd like to know if you have any suggestions. We are looking at this carefully and would really appreciate input.

Sorry I took so long to come up with this. I hope it works for you. I figured this out by snooping around some sites that have streaming mp3 files. The answer is very simple.

Steaming mp3 files are ordinary mp3 files, but the link to them needs to be of the type m3u. Here's something that works on my server.

1) put an mp3 file up on the server. In my test case the file name is 2andFor.mp3. The URL of this file on my server is http://mosc.com/~mosc/2andFro.mp3 Note: when you click on this link the mp3 file downloads and then plays, depending on how your bowser helper applications are set up. This is not what you want, I assume. It's certainly not streaming because the entire file has to get downloaded before the music starts.

2) create another file called 2andFro.m3u (continuing my example) that has one line of text, the URL of the mp3 file. In my case the contents of the m3u file would be:

Code:

http://mosc.com/~mosc/2andFro.mp3

3) On any HTML page just make a link to that m3u file and it'll stream on the client. My example http://mosc.com/~mosc/2andFro.m3u Note: when you click on this link, the player starts up and when enough data is buffered, the music starts. This is streaming.

This should allow you to stream mp3s from virtually any ISP, unless they specifically block it, which many do. Please let us (the electro-music.com community) know if this works for you._________________--Howard
my music and other stuff

In order to do streaming of Real Audio files, I believe you have to use the Real Server. I installed this on my Linux machine. You get a free license if you only have 25 or less streams. I didn't like the install process and you have to configure things in a peculiar way.

As you can see, mp3 streaming is pretty easy.

The easiest format to use is the Microsoft Media format, wma. This does automatic streaming from any server. Also, the sound quality is the best of mp3 or Real Audio. I don't have any experience in making wma files, but I believe it is worth the effort.

Well, why don't you put two or three: Real, mp3 and wma up on the same page and make poll on a new topic in the hot to forum and let everyone vote on which is better. When you start a new topic, you can create a poll, or so it says._________________--Howard
my music and other stuff

I listened to a lot of your stuff on normusic.com and the Real stuff sounds pretty good to me. One of the things I find bad about mp3 is the stereo. Your RAs have good stereo it seems to me. I wouldn't worry about the formats and just make the music.

When are you going to make a CD, or are you just planning on putting up files on your web sites?_________________--Howard
my music and other stuff

I'm going to chime in late with a thought on this subject just to get another post in.

I'm wondering if anyone would find it useful to embed their mp3 into a Flash file. It would stream automatically for listening and it would be very difficult for anyone to steal/copy/edit your music as the Flash file (.swf) is virtually useless for anything but playback.

I have no idea how the sound quality of this method would rate though.

Embedded mp3 in Flash is OK. But there are a lot of software tools out there for extracting those. So I guess it is no real protection against piracy. And so called flash sound streaming is not really streaming as such since the media files are dumped into a hidden temp dir on the client machine. The actual playback is done from a combination of a disk and ram buffer. Sound quality depends on bitrate and bytesize.

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